100,000 Questions and Counting

October 8, 2012

Today, we're celebrating an important milestone for Vocabulary.com: the addition of the 100,000th question in the Challenge. And we're confident that the hard work we've put into creating so many questions will pay off in an even better experience for everyone playing the Challenge. Why? Because when it comes to learning words, variety and repetition are key, and 100,000 questions guarantees we can provide that to you.

When you read, you learn words by interpreting context clues. This is a cumulative process: the first time you see a new word, the context clues may not deliver a full understanding of the word's meaning, but the next few times you encounter that word, new clues will complete your sense of that word. The Challenge works in much the same way. The more questions you play, the more chances you have to deepen your understanding of the words you're working on.

It's important that these questions vary. When you play the Challenge, you may start out with a question that asks you to pick a definition for that word out of a list. Then you'll be asked to infer a word's meaning from a sentence it's in, choose an antonym or a synonym for that word, or use it to fill in a blank in a sentence. The game might also serve up a question about a given word, such as, "Which of the following would most likely possess talons?" We vary the question types to replicate the way you learn words when you're reading — variation also keeps you on your toes. Now that we have 100,000 questions to work with, we can vary questions more than ever before.

One hundred thousand questions also lets us make more words learnable. Throughout the site, you'll see even more check marks that let you know a word can be added to your Challenge queue or learned through an interactive Vocabulary List. We're not stopping at 100,000 either; we're continuing to add new questions and make new words learnable all the time.